FLITTING DAY.
Our readers will perhaps recollect a former article, in which we treated of the subject of removals—that is to say, the practice so general in Scotland (though otherwise in England) of shifting almost every year from one house to another, in a constant expectation of finding theTO KALON, as the Greeks call it, or, as we shall rather style it, theQUITE THE THINGof house accommodation, which, however, is discovered at one year’s end to be exactly as remote as it was a twelvemonth before, and still, like general happiness, is “on before”—far looming over the horizon, like a vessel bound for some distant part of the globe, and not to be caught or overtaken, let us speed after it as we may. We have heard various individuals acknowledge that there were some goodhome truthsin that article, though we rather believe the housewives in general were surprised at our blindness to the beauties of a good back-green. Let that be as it may, there was one thing in which that article was totally deficient—to wit, an account of the particular horrors ofremoving dayitself, or, as we in Scotland call it,flitting day—a day styled in the calendar Whitsunday, and dedicated to we don’t know what sacred use, but which, without regard to its sacred use, whateverthat may be, we think men might wish that, above all others, it were fairly blotted out of the calendar—expunged from the very year itself—utterly annihilated and forgotten, because of the unhappy secular use to which it has been put from time immemorial. The 25th of May, or Whitsunday old style, is indeed a day of peculiar agony amongst us. It is a day consecrated to the disruption of all local ties, to the rending of every kind of pleasant association, to the discomfiture of all the household goods. The very week in which it occurs, is black with its atmosphere of pain.
It may be surprising to persons unacquainted with Scotland, that the people should be so fond of removing, since the day on which that event takes place is apt to be so very disagreeable. They might as well wonder that people should ever marry, when they know so very well that the charge of a family is apt to be burdensome. Candlemas day, on which people take their houses, is a day of heedless joy, a day of fond and delirious anticipation; and Whitsunday is to it what execution-day is to the particular time when an unfortunate man was tempted to enrich himself at some other body’s expense. “On Wednesday I killed my wife, on Saturday I was hanged,” as the child’s rhyme goes: no one can doubt that Wednesday was in this case a very pleasant day, whatever might be the state of the honest man’s feelings at the end of the week. So it is with Candlemas and Whitsunday. On the former of these days we are actuated by a spirit of spite and dissatisfaction with our present abode; it is every thing that is disagreeable, and we must at all hazards get quit of it. Accordingly, the taking of another, and, as we think, better habitation, naturally appears as the opening of a haven of relief, and, of course, we have a great deal of either positive or negative pleasure in the day. Nor is this satisfaction confined to the day on which the new house is leased: it extends up to the very commencement of that week of suffering which involves Whitsunday—up to thefirst material disarrangement of furniture preparatory to removal. During the time which elapses between the leasing of the new habitation and our removal to it, we abandon all care for our present abode. Any thing that goes wrong about it must just remain so. If a lock were required for the door, we would scarcely put ourselves to the trouble of getting it, but remain content with some provisional system of security, such as putting a table behind it. A large piece of plaster might fall down from the ceiling, or half of the floor of the dining-room sink into the kitchen—a whole gable or side-wall, almost, might fall away, but we would never think of troubling ourselves with any attempt at repairs. It is a horrid house at any rate, and, for all the time we are to be in it, it does not matter. We’ll soon be getting into our nice new house, and I’ll warrant you no plaster will fall down from the ceilingthere, nor either floor or gable give way. Every thing will be right when we get to —— Street. The house, under this system of feeling, begins to wear a desolate look. Every thing is permitted, according to the old Scottish phrase, just to hang as it grows. The whole bonds of household discipline are relaxed. The servants, who are to be changed too perhaps, as well as the house, begin to do thingsany way, and yet the mistress hardly chides them. The fact is, she has given up all idea of comfort in the condemned house, and lives entirely on the hope of seeing every thing trig in her new abode. She would make no great complaint, as we verily believe, if the servants obliged her by their carelessness to spend all the remaining part of the lease up to her knees in water. Every thing will be right when we get to —— Street, so we’ll just put up with it. Every now and then one of the children comes in, like the messengers in Macbeth, to tell her of the progress of mischief. One has to mention, that a boy throwing stones has just broken two panes in the drawing-room window, the lower chess having been up at the time. No matter; all will be right when we get to —— Street. Another “cream-facedloon” rushes in to say, that the girls in the kitchen have just broken down the grate, and snapped the poker in two. No matter; all will be right when we get to —— Street. Nay, it is not too much to suppose that, although she were told of the house having just begun to sink into the earth, she would take it all with the most philosophic coolness, and console herself for every present mishap by a reference to the joys which are to be experienced in that home of promise. The prospect of a removal, it will be observed, is thus enough even to revolutionise human nature. People abandon their most cherished objects of care, and disregard that of which they are in general most solicitous, under the influence of this prospect. Like the pilgrim of Bunyan (not to speak it profanely), they thrust their fingers in their ears, in order to shut out all lateral subjects of thought, and rush on—on—on towards the new house.
At last the throes of actual removal begin to be felt, and, for the time, all happy anticipation is deadened within us. You have long ago ascertained, by a ceremonious call upon the present tenants of your new mansion, that they cannot remove an hour before Whitsunday at noon, which gives you the comfortable assurance that your flitting will be, like a sharp fever, soon over. The lady who is coming toyourhouse soon after makes a ceremonious call uponyou, and ascertains, of course, that you can only remove at that hour also. If matters should happen otherwise—if you are either going to a house altogether new, or to one which can be vacated a short while before the term-day, then what a convenience it is!—we shall have the painters in, and get it all put to rights before we flit a single stick; and after it is all right, we shall remove quite at our leisure. By this plan we shall not only avoid the risk of breaking things, which is always the case in a hurried flitting, but we shall get porters and carters a great deal cheaper, for these fellows, you know, charge three wages on the actual term-day, when every body is flitting. But if it should happen, as above mentioned, that you are limited to a fewhours, so that your furniture, as it goes out, will meet the furniture of another person coming in, and, as it goes in, will meet, in tug of war, that of another person coming out, then the blessed anticipation of your future comforts in “that nice house” reconciles you to every thing, and you make yourself think that, after all, it is better, when oneisflitting, to have it all over in the shortest possible space of time.
Sometimes, even when you have a vantage space, you are strangely jockeyed out of it before you are aware. Say the house is to be painted before you go into it. Being quite at your ease, you are satisfied that the painters are engaged about two months before the term. You know very well that these men are the greatest of all rascals; that, indeed, they have no other principle within them but just to put people to as much trouble as possible. But two months! that must surely be sufficient. Well, the painters come all this time before the term, and, like the ancient Spanish navigators, take possession of a newly-discovered country, mark the job for their own, by planting a nasty pail in one room, and setting up a brush on end against the wall in another. You look in about a week after, and see the pail and the brushin statu quo: the fellows have as yet done nothing but takenseisin.[3]You think this is not just quite right, and calling in a cool easy way at the master’s as you go home, express your wish that the job should be immediately proceeded with, being anxious to get into the house as long before the term as possible. The painter is all politeness, and promises toput men upon the housenext morning, so that it will be got ready for your reception inno time—by which he appears to mean a space of time so brief as not to be worth defining, but which you eventually find to have signified that the job would be finishednot at all in time. As you come home to your dinner next afternoon,you take a turn that way to see how “the men” are getting on. The house is as empty and desolate as ever; but, from a change in the relative situations of the pail and the brush, you see that theyhavebeen there. On inspecting things more minutely, you find that one bed-room has been washed down, and is now, to use a kitchen phrase,swimming. Well, this is a beginning, you think. “The men” have been doing what they could to-day, and to-morrow they would be a good way advanced. On this supposition, you take no more thought about the house for three or four days more, when, dropping in as before, you have the satisfaction of seeing that there isanother pail, and that the ceiling of the dining-room has been whitewashed. Still, dilatory as the rascals evidently are, you hardly think there is a sufficientcasus fœderis, or breach of treaty, to entitle you to go and blow up the polite man at head-quarters. You suffer for another day; and then, dropping in again, you find a little Flibbertigibbet of a boy exerting himself with his tiny arms to whitewash the ceiling of the parlour. Well, my boy, where are “the men?” This is your question; but for answer you only learn that there have never been any men in the matter—nobody has ever been here but Flibbertigibbet himself. You feel, at this intelligence, almost as much bewildered and obfusculated as George the Second was when he asked an Irish sergeant at a review after the seven years’ war, where was the —— regiment? and was answered, “Please your majesty, I’se the —— regiment;” the Hibernian being in reality the only man that had survived the last campaign. Is thisthe men, you say to yourself, that Mr —— promised to put upon the house? You go of course instantly, and, Mr —— being, by his own good fortune, from home, you leave a note for him, expressed in such terms as you are sure must bring him to his senses, if any thing will. Dropping in next day to see the effect, your ire is soothed at finding three men at work besides Flibbertigibbet, and every thing seems going on so well, that you trouble them no more fora week. But it is needless to pursue this painful theme any farther. Suffice it to say, that, having once got these artists into the house, you feel by and by as if they were never again to be got out; you fear that, contrary to the catastrophe of the well-known jest, there will be no letting go the painter. Their pails, and buckets, and brushes, and all their slopery, are just as rife in the house a week before the term as they were a month earlier; and still to every remonstrance Mr —— replies, that all he can do is toput on more men next Monday morning. It is all you can do, perhaps, to get the odious varlets trundled out, “pots and all,” on the very day before you are compelled to remove; so that, instead of having ample scope and verge enough, as you expected, you find that you will be just as much hurried and flurried as if you had been going to a house not previously vacated.
Well, whatever be the foregoing circumstances, flitting day at last arrives in all its horrors. The lady of the household has for several days been storing all kinds of small things by into drawers and boxes, that they might the more safely be transported, so that the family finds itself already deprived of the half of those things which are necessary to comfort, and the whole of what minister to luxury. Your shaving-box is amissing two mornings before flitting day, and has to be fished up, like a “drowned honour,” from the bottom of some abyss of well-regarded trifles. When you come home to dinner on flitting day eve, it is any money for a boot-jack. You take your meals that evening without table-cloths; and unless you can bring down your proud stomach to a brown kitchen bowl, any thing like a comforting drink is out of the question. The crepuscular anguish of the day is already felt. You go to your bed that night off an uncarpeted floor, and in the midst of all kinds of tubs covered up with packsheet, and looking-glasses swaddled up in linen. If you get a nightcap, you may consider yourself lucky above all mortal men. You go to bed, but sleep there is none, for you have to risenext morning long before the usual hour, and the anticipatory sense of what you have to go through that day fills every nook and cranny of your mind. You awake to a rush of children and servants on the stairs; and though you exert every nerve of your memory to recollect the new geography of things in the room, it is ten to one but you stumble over some tub or chest in the dark, where you thought no tub should be; and, upon the whole, the feeling with which you thrust your poor cold distressed shanks into your vestments, is not much short of that which must possess a man about to walk to the scaffold. A breakfast composed of every thing but the proper materials, and taken out of every thing but the proper vessels, collects such a group of shabby slatternly figures as you did not before think yourself husband, or father, or master to. The meal is gulped in agonies of haste, for the carts were to be at the door at seven exactly, and it is now within a few minutes of the hour. Well, the carts come; one by one are your household goods displaced and packed up on those vehicles. Grates are placed on the breadth of their backs at the bottom, by way of ballast. Then mattresses go over them, to make an agreeable flooring for other things. Tables are tumbled a-top, with their legs reared high in the air, like cart-horses enjoying themselves in their Sunday pastures; and to the ropes with which the heaps are bound down, are attached fry-pans, children’s toys, and other light articles, all by way of garnishing. Though far above such things in general, you are obliged on this occasion to see after very mean details, lest your property should suffer some dreadful damage. The more delicate articles are necessarily entrusted to porters or other serviceable individuals, who carry them separately to your new house. “The boys,” glad to escape the school for a day, are employed, to their great satisfaction, in transporting single things, “which don’t break;” and the servants see after certain baskets of crystal and crockery, “which do.” To see all things properly disposed of—each to the individual bestfitted for it—is your business, and no easy one it is. At length, after every thing is fairly packed off, the lady and yourself walk away together, the cat following in a pillow-slip under the charge of your second eldest daughter.
Before three in the afternoon, the whole of your furniture, broken and whole, has been thrust, higglety-pigglety, into your new house, where you find all things in the most chaotic state of confusion. Kitchen things repose in the dining-room; drawing-room chairs are deposited in the kitchen; and a huge chest of drawers stands in the vestibule, with a shoulder thrust so far out into thefair wayas to render it almost impossible to pass. The kitchen grate is only to be built in after six o’clock in the evening, when the masons are released from their day’s work; so there is no possibility of cooking any thing. Aprovisionalarrangement is therefore made on this point. You, and your wife, and your children, and all your assistants, bivouac in some shabby parlour, and regale yourselves (absit elegantia) with rolls and porter. Henry, your eldest son, who has wrought like a Turk all day, leads the feast with his coat off, and the scene can only be compared to a rough-and-tumbling in the back woods of America. No ceremony as to knives. Rolls, and even large loaves, are torn through the middle, and large mouthfuls dug out from the mass by the thumb or forefinger. The liquor goes round in some ordinary vessel, never before appropriated to such a purpose, and all feeling of discomfort being stolen away by the novelty and strong natural feeling of the occasion, the jest and laugh abound. Even in the midst of all the disarray, great hopes and expectations are expressed regarding the new mansion. Such capital high ceilings! Such a broad elegant lobby! So different from that dismal hole we have left! Or, if the ceilings are low, and the lobby narrow, while in the former house they were the reverse, the contrast is drawn in reference to some other points where superiority is indisputable, while the demerits of the new abode are cast discreetly into shade, only to be brought outand complained of at the approach of next Candlemas. You either have left a good view from the windows, or you are entering upon one. Suppose your former house, being in the centre of the town, had hardly any view, then your wife thus comments upon it:—“Such a dark confined place! Nothing to be seen from the windows, but the opposite houses, or else the chimney-stalks andold wives. Now, here we are quite in the country. The drawing-room commands Fife and North Berwick Law, and even from the bed-rooms we catch a great lump of the Dalmahoy hills. If we just step to the end of the house, we are into the fields; and then we’ll be so very quiet here, compared with what we were. Not a carriage or a cart passing from morning till night. We’ll get some rest at last; and truth to tell, my health is in great need of it. How truly delightful thus to get fairly out of that black, smoky, noisy town, to a place where we can enjoy all the pleasures of the country, and yet be within reach of every convenience of the city! And just consider how much benefit the walk must be to your own health. We formerly lived so near your place of business, that you got no exercise at all, seeing that I never could prevail upon you to take a walk on purpose. But here youmustwalk, and the good it must do you will be visible in a week’s time,”—&c. &c. &c. If the case has been totally the reverse, you are addressed as follows:—“How delightful to get fairly away from that cold, out-of-the-world, dull place, and once more feel ourselves snug in the town! We’ve no prospects here from the windows; but, ’deed, when folk have prospects, I never see that they make much use of them. For my part, I never looked out of the drawing-room windows once in the month; for what are the Fife hills or North Berwick Law after one has once seen them? [What philosophy we have here!] And then, what good did we get from the garden? It was just a fash to keep right; and I’m sure, when we had paid the gardener, we did not make a penny off the vegetables. Now, here, although there be little prospectfrom any of the windows, we’re at least a great deal better protected from the wind. If we have not a garden of our own, have we not the green market almost at the door? And such a weary distance you had to walk every day! No more of that now. Here, when you want a walk, you can take one; and when you don’t like, you can let it alone. Walks are very well, perhaps, in good summer weather; but I’ve no idea of seeing you plash through a long dirty road twice every day through the whole winter. Whenever we want either a walk or a prospect, we’ll get it in the Queen Street gardens; for you know Mrs —— has told me that we may have her key whenever we like. In our old ill-contrived house, we had no place to put any thing off our hand; not so much as a cupboard in the whole house; but now, you see, we have as many presses as rooms, and a capital cellar for coals and lumber. And how near we are here to all the best shops! If it were for nothing but the convenience of getting tea-bread at a minute’s warning from Mr Littlejohn, the baker, whenever any person calls upon us in the evening, it would have been worth while to remove to this house. The lass likewise tells me that there is a very obliging woman, quite at hand, who keeps a mangle for the use of the neighbourhood, which will be a great convenience to the family; and that she will take in hand to supply us with milk or cream at any hour of the day,”—&c. &c. &c. Thus, it will be observed, neither the spirit of discontent nor the spirit of hope is ever without material for feeding its particular necessities.
You have now got fairly into your new house, bag and baggage. It is after the manner, however, of a certain pound of comfits which a carrier once brought from a city confectioner to a country customer. The paper bag having proved insufficient in the journey, the contents had dispersed themselves throughout all the other packages in the cart. Every parcel, and bag, and box, had to be shaken clear of the lurking carvy, till, the whole of the bulky articleshaving been discharged and laid off, the little white particles were found at the bottom mingled with straws, fragments of rope, and paper, and all other kinds of trash. The whole having been swept out, however, the honest old carrier brought them to the owner in a large platter, saying, with the air of a man who has relieved his conscience of some uncommon weight, “Here they are, mistress; ye hae them a’ for me.” Just like the comfits are all your goods and chattels—your ox, and your ass, and your children, and your every thing else—the whole are there; but in such a state! Perhaps, to add to your distresses, you have to delay putting the principal rooms to rights till the painters have to be with you. This, of course, adjourns the termination of your agoniessine die. Perhaps, about three months after, when you have battled the rascals out of one room into another, much after the manner of the siege of St Sebastian, you get at last into the enviable attitude “as you were,” resolving of course never again to remove as long as you live, but still as ready before next 2d of February to take that step as ever.
FOOTNOTES:[3]A ceremony in the law of Scotland, by which a man becomes invested with a piece of land or house property.
[3]A ceremony in the law of Scotland, by which a man becomes invested with a piece of land or house property.
[3]A ceremony in the law of Scotland, by which a man becomes invested with a piece of land or house property.